The Earth has a dynamic interior

As models and measurements have become more sophisticated,geophysicists envision a planetary

interior that looks more like the figure below.

Schematic diagram of Earth showing the modern conceptualization of its dynamic interior. Arrows depict
motion driven by internal heat. This involves hot upwelling material from the core-mantle boundary and
cold sinking material originating from convergent plate boundaries on the surface.

This schematic diagram is a much more up to date version of what we think is going on in the interior of
the Earth, at least in the mantle. The take-home message here is motion. See all these little black arrows
everywhere. They are showing you that the mantle is not actually just statically sitting there. It is moving
around all the time. The thing that drives that motion is internal heat. The core has a lot of excess heat
from the formation of the Earth and from the decay of radioactive elements. It needs to get rid of that
heat somehow. The way it does it is by convection. That means moving hot material from one place to
another where it can give that heat away. From the core mantle boundary up, first of all, you have got
this weird D double prime layer where strange things happen to seismic waves that get in there. Here is a
plume of material that is buoyantly rising because it is hot. This has been posited to be the source for hot
spot volcanoes like this one in the picture here. We also have arrows that show things that are sinking.
Right here is a cross-section of a subduction zone and you can see the slab is sinking. A lot of slabs get
sort of hung up around 670 km depth. This is where the mantle has an increase in density and so it is
harder for a sinking slab to get through there but they do get through most of the time. When they do
the material that composes them piles up down here so it can later be recycled into whatever the rest of
the mantle is doing. The take-home message here again is motion. But I want you to also remember that
we are talking about solid rock here. It is by no means a liquid, so that motion is happening on very long
timescales.

Notice all the little black arrows in the illustration above. Those arrows show movement of material in
the mantle. The core loses heat to the overlying mantle. This heated material rises buoyantly to the
surface. In this model, the core-mantle boundary is posited to be the source for mantle plumes that give
rise to hot spot volcanism at the surface. You can also see some arrows showing heat escaping at a mid-
ocean ridge. Heat escapes as new hot crust is formed at the ridges. Far away from a mid-ocean ridge, old
cold oceanic lithosphere sinks at a subduction zone. Images from seismic velocity measurements show
that these lithospheric slabs can sink all the way to the bottom of the mantle, where they pile up.
Whether or not this material eventually becomes well-mixed with the rest of the lower mantle or
remains in its own chemically distinct pool is still a topic of debate. So, the big idea to take home from
this diagram is that the mantle of the Earth is in constant motion, driven by heat. This motion, however,
is quite slow because the mantle is not a liquid, but is actually solid rock.